I must confess to a severe case of poverty. I never took a vow of poverty; it just seems to have worked out that way for me. I am so poor the church mice have packed their bags and moved on. If I knew where they moved to, I might join them.

I must confess to a severe case of poverty. I never took a vow of
poverty; it just seems to have worked out that way for me. I am so poor
the church mice have packed their bags and moved on. If I knew where
they moved to, I might join them.
Being poor can have its advantages, but I have yet to run across any.
I am so poor I am not able to pay attention, especially when watching
some television program with the Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage.
This has caused no small problem with my wife. We love an evening of
unwinding before the TV watching some of our favorite programs. I must
confess those programs are getting less and less each year. Soon we are
going to have to go back to reading books.
Together we will be watching a program, and when I say “we,” I do it
with certain modifications. My wife will get up and go to the kitchen
for something and when she returns, she asks me a question, “What
happened?”
I look at her with one of my infamous quizzical looks and respond,
“Where?”
She then explains she is talking about what happened on the TV program
while she was away. I then tell her, “I'm sorry, I wasn't paying
attention.”
This seems to be a source of real frustration for her.
“If you can't afford to pay attention,” she will say sarcastically while
rolling her eyes, “couldn't you at least rent some attention some
time?”
I tried explaining to her that old age is making me a little more
forgetful. She, however, is not buying it, so there goes my income
stream.
For me, watching television is not an obsession; it is more like a
distraction. I do not follow every little bit on the television screen.
For me it is not a matter of life or death, it is just a matter of
recreation. I know that nothing on TV is real. We can be in the middle
of the next program and I do not realize that the first program has
ended. Talk about confusing!
When something does catch my attention, boy does it have my attention.
“Did you,” I ask my wife, “hear that?”
Then it is role reversal in prime time. I will not say she acts like me,
just that it comes pretty close to it. Not quite Oscar material, but
close.
“What?” She said with a very confused look on her face.
So I had to explain the news story that I just happened to catch. I do
not know all of the details, I was not paying that much attention, just
that someone was fired from their job for saying to a customer, “Have a
blessed day.”
I have met many customer service people that said things that I would
want them to be fired from, but this has never been on my list.
My wife then asked the question I was thinking. “What is wrong with
telling someone to have a blessed day?”
I could not figure it out. It is like at Christmas time some places do
not want their employees to say to the customer, “Merry Christmas.” The
reasoning is, it might offend someone. What about us who are offended
when somebody does not say Merry Christmas to us? This matter of being
offended can go both ways. There should be an equal offended person
law. There is a law for everything else.
I just would like to meet the person who is offended by somebody saying
to them, “Have a blessed day.”
Later that evening I was watching a new crime/detective story on TV and
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